Mavis Gallant in The New Yorker

Today word came that Mavis Gallant has died, in Paris, at the age of ninety-one. Gallant published a hundred and sixteen short stories in The New Yorker. Often, her fiction drew its energy from contradictory qualities: her stories were minutely observed but also suspenseful, matter-of-fact but also fanciful, reportorial but also imaginative. They were broad-minded, and so felt real. “From the Fifteenth District,” published in 1978, is a ghost story in which ghosts file police reports about being “haunted” by the living. And yet it feels as concrete as anything you might read in the newspaper or see with your own eyes. Gallant had a rare gift: a solid imagination.